Modern gas or combustion turbines must satisfy the highest demands with respect to reliability, weight, power, economy, and operating service life. In the development of such turbines, the material selection, the search for new suitable materials, as well as the search for new production methods, among other things, play a role in meeting standards and satisfying the demand.
The materials used for gas turbines may include titanium alloys, nickel alloys (also called super alloys) and high strength steels. For aircraft engines, titanium alloys are generally used for compressor parts, nickel alloys are suitable for the hot parts of the aircraft engine, and the high strength steels are used, for example, for compressor housings and turbine housings. The highly loaded or stressed gas turbine components, such as components for a compressor for example, are typically forged parts. Components for a turbine, on the other hand, are typically embodied as investment cast parts.
Although investment casting is not a new process, the investment casting market continues to grow as the demand for more intricate and complicated parts increase. Because of the great demand for high quality, precision castings, there continuously remains a need to develop new ways to make investment castings more quickly, efficiently, cheaply and of higher quality.
Conventional investment mold compounds that consist of fused silica, cristobalite, gypsum, or the like, that are used in casting jewelry and dental prostheses industries are generally not suitable for casting reactive alloys, such as titanium alloys. One reason is because there is a reaction between molten titanium and the investment mold.
There is a need for a simple investment mold that does not react significantly with titanium and titanium aluminide alloys. Approaches have been adopted previously with ceramic shell molds for titanium alloy castings. In the prior examples, in order to reduce the limitations of the conventional investment mold compounds, several additional mold materials have been developed. For example, an investment compound was developed of an oxidation-expansion type in which magnesium oxide or zirconia was used as a main component and metallic zirconium was added to the main constituent to compensate for the shrinkage due to solidification of the cast metal. There is thus also a need for simple and reliable investment casting methods which allow easy extraction of near-net-shape metal or metal alloys from an investment mold that does not react significantly with the metal or metal alloy.
Prior Art non-metallic composite turbine blades are, in general, of the un-cooled solid type. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,271 to Bailey et al (1991). The high thermal conductivities of this class of material requires complicated solutions to heat transferred from the flow path around the blade into the supporting blade rotor and disc structure. These design solutions are complex and add additional weight to the blade and supporting disc structure. In addition to the aforementioned, compared to current metallic blade designs, cool-able, lighter-in-weight blades are desirable to overcome the above prior art shortcomings.